An exploration of the synaesthesias and geniuscreativity

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An exploration of the synaesthesias and
genius/creativity

• Christine Simmonds-Moore

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Exploring synaesthesia

• We will be exploring the following question
• Why might synaesthesia relate to unusual
  insights and creativity?
• Definitions of synaesthesia
• Video on a man with a unique form of synaesthesia
• Discussion theories of synaesthesia

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Synaesthesia- from the Greek syn meaning
together aisthesis meaning perception
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Is this shape loud or quiet?
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From Lurias Mind of a mneumonist
Presented with a tone pitched at 50 cycles per
second and an amplitude of 100 decibels, S. saw
a brown strip against a dark background that had
red, tongue like edges The sense of taste he
experienced was like that of sweet and sour
bourscht, a sensation that gripped his entire
tongue Presented with a tone pitched at 2,000
cycles per second and having an amplitude of 113
decibels, S. said it looks something like
fireworks tinged with a pink-red hue. The strip
of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has
an ugly taste rather like that of a briny
pickle
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Some definitions

• Marks synaesthesia is a continuum
• Weak synaesthesia
• Literary or poetic synaesthesia
• E.g., that shirt is loud I am feeling down
  today that lemon was really sharp
• Building block of anomalous experiences?
• Personality?
• Strong synaesthesia
• A perceptual phenomenon
• Sensory and perceptual response to stimuli in
  sensory modalities not usually associated with
  that stimulus
• Those with strong synaesthesia synaesthetes

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Who has strong synaesthesia?

• 1 in 20 (Galton, 1883 Simner, 2005)
• 1 in 25,000 (Cytowic, 1989)
• 1 in 2,000 (Baron-Cohen et al. 1996)
• 1 in 200 (Ramachandran and Hubbard, 2001)
• More common in children than adults
• Women gt men?
• 1 in 1150 females1 in 7150 males (Rich, Bradshaw
  Mattingley, 2005)
• Synaesthesia tends to run in families
• X-chromosome dominant?
• Often associated with creative individuals

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Some famous synaesthetes

• Lurias patient S
• Feynmann
• Kandinsky
• Nobokov
• this rather freakish gift of seeing letters in
  colour
• Messiaen
• Scriabin
• Liszt
• Baudelaire
• Rimbaud
• A.S. Byatt

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Aetiology of synaesthesia

• Synaesthesia can arise in three different ways
  (Grossenbacher and Lovelace, 2001)
• Developmental synaesthesia
• The most common form of synaesthesia
• Acquired synaesthesia
• Brain damage or sensory deafferentation
• Via drugs such as LSD

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Phenomenology

• There are two components to a synaesthetic
  experience
• (I)? ( C) (Grossenbacher and lovelace)
• The inducer/stimulus
• The concurrent
• Dimensionality of synaesthesia
• usually but not always unidimensional
• Automaticity
• Consistency of inducer-concurrent
• Individuality of the concurrent within same forms
  of synaesthesia

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Video on Brain Man..

• Why do you think Daniel has synaesthesia?
• Is there anything in his childhood that might
  have precipitated his unusual experiences?
• How do you think his autism impacted on his
  synaesthesia?
• What methods were used to test his synaesthesia
  in the film?

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Exploring inducers and concurrents in synaesthesia

• Inducers
• Inducers are often external stimuli
• Over-representation of auditory sense as inducers
  in cases of synaesthesia
• Many inducers are meaning based
• linguistic or musical
• Can be imaginary
• Concurrents
• Occurs in addition to usual response to inducer
• Over-representation of visual sense as
  concurrents
• Followed by touch and hearing
• Visual concurrents are often lower level aspects
  of vision, e.g., colour rather than higher level
  percepts

This painting is contrasting sounds by
Kandinsky
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Validity reliability of synaesthesia

• Test-retest experiments e.g., The test of
  Genuineness (Baron-Cohen, Wyke and Binnie, 1987)
• Synaesthesia may be distinguished from psuedo
  synaesthesia
• Consistency of synaesthesia
• Stroop style tests
• Validity is also supported by studies employing
  neuroimaging of the brain

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Theories of synaesthesia1. Learned associations

• Is synaesthesia equivalent to sequence learning?
• A variant of this is the environmentally shaped
  brain maturation theory
• E.g., Crick

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2. Limbic theory

• Limbic system linkage theory (e.g., Myers,
  Wundt, Boring, Cytowic and Wood)
• Suppression of the activity of the cerebral
  neocortex
• Increase in the activity in lower neural
  systems the limbic system
• particularly the hippocampus

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3. Synaesthesia and neural pruning

• Maurers developmental synaesthesia
• Baron Cohen and Harrison support this view
• Ramachandran and Hubbards failure of neural
  pruning
• Local cross activation model

Similar to the idea of thin and thick
boundaries, in terms of neural connections
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4. Synaesthesia and sensory leakage

• Sensory information leaks into pathways of other
  senses
• Brain gateways, e.g., LGN, Raphe nucleus
• Harrison not much evidence for this theory
• Some neurons are responsive to stimulation from gt
  1 sensory stimulus

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5. Disinhibited feedback models

• Grossenbacher and Lovelaces disinhibited
  feedback theory
• Long range disinhibited feedback from a
  multisensory nexus in the brain e.g., temporo
  parietal occipital junction
• Synaesthesia is based on our normal cognitive
  architecture
• In support of Grossenbacher and Lovelace,
  synaesthesia can be induced
• Meditation (Walsh, 2005)
• Drugs, e.g. Ayhuasca, hashish, mescaline, LSD

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6. Hybrid model

• Re entrant processing model - Myles et al and
  Smilek et al, 2001
• When perception of an object takes place, there
  are different stages prior to the conscious
  experience of the object
• 1. Feed forward - sensory perception of features
  of the object (e.g., colour, texture, etc.) in
  various areas of the brain
• 2. Feedback systems somehow allow for the
  conscious experience of a unified experience of
  the object
• ABERRANT NEURAL ACTIVITY IN FEEDBACK PATHWAYS ?
  NEURAL SYSTEMS ARE ACTIVATED IN ADDITION TO
  VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF OBJECT ITSELF

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Summary

• Synaesthesia occurs both weakly and strongly
• Synaesthesia can be congenital or induced via
  drugs/ascs
• Congenital and drug induced synaesthesia have
  superficially similar phenomenology but
  potentially different explanations
• A variety of explanatory frameworks
• Increased connectivity ?
• Synaesthesia is associated with peak experiences,
  alterations in conscious experience and
  creativity
• Connectivity ? Unusual connections ?
  seeing/representing the world in different way
• Mneumonics ? enhanced memory
• Synaesthesia can aid our understanding of normal
  and abnormal perception and neural representation
  in the brain

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References for further reading

• Chapter on synaesthesia by Marks in Varieties of
  anomalous experience examining the scientific
  evidence / edited by Etzel Cardeña, Steven Jay
  Lynn, Stanley Krippner (in the Sheppard-warlock
  library)
• http//home.comcast.net/sean.day/html/academic_ar
  ticles.html
• - A lot of really good academic articles on
  synaesthesia.
• - This site also contains Grossenbacher and
  Lovelaces review article on synaesthesia and
  several others
• http//psy.ucsd.edu/edhubbard/
• This is Hubbards website, containing some
  excellent academic articles, including several by
  Ramachandran and other key authors in the area